


Hope

by emptybackpack



Category: Stargate Universe
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-12-21
Updated: 2009-12-21
Packaged: 2017-10-04 22:48:00
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,020
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/34928
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/emptybackpack/pseuds/emptybackpack
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Everybody's going to die someday, and there is nothing Rush or anyone else can do to change that. The only thing he can do to make a permanent difference in people's perceptions of and attitudes toward their own mortality is to show them what the universe looks like, show them the sheer unending beauty of all of creation as he sees it.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Hope

**Author's Note:**

  * For [littlemimm](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts?recipient=littlemimm).



It's stupid, but Everett can't stop thinking about what Rush said on the second Kino they'd found. Not the line from Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid - that was a surprise, but it was the sort of information about another person that they were in no situation to pursue. Maybe back on Earth it would have been a starting point for some sort of acquaintanceship, if not friendship, but there wasn't any place for that here. Everett isn't sure he'd be able to forgive Rush for what he'd done, for getting them into this mess, even if they had been friends before all of this had happened.

But what's keeping Everett up at night, what he heard on that second time-capsule Kino, might actually go a little bit of the vast distance toward Rush's eventual forgiveness.

When Everett first took this job, he thought he would never see anything weirder. He never said anything about it, because a commander wasn't supposed to show how much they were fazed even when they were, but every time something stranger was presented - going up in a working space ship, the first time he saw the backwash from an engaging wormhole, being transported thousands of miles through a mechanism that looked like it had come straight out of Star Trek - he always found himself thinking that there was no way it could get any more unbelievable. But it always did.

But of course this time, Everett thinks, it can't get any weirder than this. Even in all the files of the SGC, of Atlantis base, even in the long and convoluted history of SG-1, there hasn't been anything weirder than this. He'd been privy to his own death occurring twice in the same day now, had sat in front row seats for the deaths of people sitting next to him recorded for their leisurely perusal. Not even SG-1 had held that unwelcome position.

So maybe that's the reason that what Rush said on those tapes is getting to him so much. Maybe it's just that Rush was talking about death and that Everett is aware that right now, even as they go about their horrible daily lives and administer their makeshift cure to everyone on the ship, there are simultaneously two other versions of the ship Destiny where his crew are all dead and dying, where he himself is dead, and the people under his care don't even have the tenuous hope they hold right now.

Rush was an asshole in how he'd responded to the kid Eli's fears of death, but that was just about par for the course for him. But the curious thing was that he was more than that. Everett had seen the scientists talk to each other, seen the way they sometimes communicated their hopes and fears in ways that might seem callous to the unscientifically-minded but which were no less human. And that's the way Rush had been talking to Eli about death - in that language of scientists where they talk about how cold and vast and empty the universe is and it's a comfort to them.

Everett's never gotten that. He likes the solid ground under his feet, the blue sky around him, distances and spaces he knows the contents and hazards of. The idea that if he were to step out of an airlock right now and his body could drift forever until the end of time without encountering a single other object is a horrifying one he doesn't like to think about, not something that's fascinating and amazing and a miracle of God. But that's what it is to the scientists.

Everett's always tried not to think too hard about death or the vast emptiness of space or what comes after. It's too depressing, too unimaginable, and he feels like without the barrier of religion or fast living or willful ignorance or any of the other methods people use to shield themselves from it, most people, when confronted with the utter reality of not having a single fucking clue about almost anything, would start screaming and never stop. Most people, Everett included, go through life with a veil in place to protect themselves from thinking too much about any of that crap. They carry the hope that, if they just never ask the question, then they won't get an answer they don't like.

But scientists, strange as they are, spend their lives trying to tear that veil away. It's always been a little bit unnatural to Everett. Who the hell wants to feel that kind of hopelessness every damn day of their lives?

But the way Rush spoke about it, it's not hopelessness. Oh, it's hopelessness for their crew, all right - and Everett will never, ever totally let that go, not now that some of his people have _died_ \- but he almost gets what Rush was trying to do by stranding them out here on this godforsaken rustbucket in the middle of literally nowhere. The way Rush sees it, the way Eli probably sees it, the way scientists twenty or a hundred or even a thousand years from now will see it, what they are doing is granting the chance for a more solid hope to every single person who ever learns of what they are doing here.

Everybody's going to die someday, and there is nothing Rush or anyone else can do to change that. The only thing he can do to make a permanent difference in people's perceptions of and attitudes toward their own mortality is to show them what the universe looks like, show them the sheer unending beauty of all of creation as he sees it. Rush prefers the hope he can get from the reality that there _is_ something more out there, something greater than their short lives which burn out in a blink and eventually mean nothing, to the hope that can be gained from pretending that death is something that it's not. Everett's never been the sort of man to go for religion, but maybe this is a version of the story of creation he can get behind.


End file.
